With Understanding Probability: Chance Rules in Everyday Life Henk Tijms makes an effort to show that Probability has expanded over the years, from just covering games of chance and their outcomes to being an engineer’s best friend in some cases. Whether it is making a phone network that can handle a full load of calls to engineering a dike that can hold all the rainfall it needs to, probabilities and chance have an important role in our lives.

The book is nice for many other reasons: it is full of examples, the footnotes contain biographical information on certain well-respected mathematicians, it has these little touches that make it charming to read and look at and so on.

The book is divided into 15 chapters. Each chapter goes into a small aspect of probability. From basic rules of chance, all the way up to Markov Chains, it makes me wonder if they have some kind of international standard for textbooks on this subject. In any case, the first six chapters cover Probability in everyday life. Lotteries and gambling and stock investing cover this section. It does certainly make the section interesting. It also covers distributions and statistical applications of probability. The next section covers Probability as well but does so in a deeper and more involved manner. It has a section that involves countable and uncountable sets for instance.

All in all, this was a pretty good text on Probability and was quite enjoyable. ( )